


penitentes

by MoonyJ4M



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Apologies, Crisis of Faith, Guilty Dean, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Men of Letters Bunker, Physical Disability, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-22
Updated: 2015-07-22
Packaged: 2018-04-10 18:08:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4402037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MoonyJ4M/pseuds/MoonyJ4M
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam only ever believed in two things in his life, and they both betrayed him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	penitentes

The wood creaks when Sam sits on the bench, too loud for all the empty space around him. He looks around, mortified, but no one seems to care; there are only about three other people scattered around the place, too absorbed on their own prayers to mind his presence there. 

Sam feels as detached from them as someone who one day did the same but that now can’t really grasp the meaning of faith anymore; he doesn’t even know if he has any left. There’s nothing to wonder about Heaven or Hell anymore, no intent from angels or God himself for him to fret over. 

The statues are still beautiful, though.

He’s torn between admiring the Virgin Mary placed at one of the pillars of the altar and wondering why churches are so presumptuous with all that gold when someone sits beside him.

Father Johann can’t be much older than Sam himself. He’s been helping them since the church had suffered a particularly bad case of ghosts sneaking out from their tombs underneath the ground. They were probably sitting right over some of the very bones Sam and Dean had burned.

But that was a long time ago.

It’s not that they don’t hunt anymore, Dean would say, and God bless him, Sam wouldn’t dare to contradict what keeps him asleep at night. It’s just that they’ve got their distance now, more like a base to look up to than anything else. Honestly, Sam thinks it’s a miracle they still have connections considering, well, all the things they’d let loose in the world in the past few decades.

He had gone to the church that morning for the great collection of sacred books Johann had going on and that he wouldn’t let Sam borrow for a couple of days to make copies, just to keep it archived, please?, gratefulness be damned. Sam still struggles to think of anyone as a friend, too tainted by everything that’s happened to the previous ones to risk it again, but he dares say the Father is close enough.

“What are you thinking about?” he asks eventually.

“That my faith is gone,” Sam answers after a moment, still looking in the general direction of the altar. 

“You’ve seen too much,” he shrugs, as if it’s the most obvious answer. It probably is. “Faith’s a lot about… trusting the unknown. It depends on it.” 

“I guess you’re right, it’s just…” Sam sighs, turns to face him. “It’s like there was this place in me, where I had this faith, and now it’s empty. I don’t believe in anything, I don’t expect anything. There’s this… huge part of what I was that doesn’t exist anymore, and I can’t even miss it. I think I’m mourning the person I used to be.”

“I think you didn’t come here just to read,” Johann answers, smiling softly. Sam huffs a laugh at that, stares at his hands for a minute, unsure. “Sounds like you're having a crisis of faith.” 

“Still better than Dean's midlife crisis, I guess.” 

“Speaking of which, where's him?” 

“At his appointment. He doesn't let me go with him anymore.” 

Johann hums his acknowledgement. They stay in silence for a while; a woman stops by them to ask for a blessing, then kneels quickly in front of the crucified Jesus high on the altar to make the sign of the cross before she leaves the church. Sam still has the same reflex, though he doesn’t act on it as frequently. 

“Can I make a confession?” 

“As I am a ordained priest, sure.” 

“Do we have to go to that booth or…” 

“I don’t think Mrs. Maple over there will bother.” 

“I only ever believed in two things in my life, and they both betrayed me,” Sam starts, at first more to himself than to the priest. “No offense, Father, but God... I thought there was a greater good, something like God's will, but everything's just... so cynical. I miss trusting something bigger than ourselves. Maybe even now I could wrap my mind around believing in such things again, but I could never _trust_ it again.” 

“Well, there it is. You don’t really have the option of not believing anymore. It seems to me that the burden of knowing something is worse than choosing to believe.” 

“I've seen evil my whole life, y'know. I wanted… I wished I could be saved. Cleansed. I wanted to trust that something good could still happen. It turns out that the great scheme of things is bullshit. Sorry.”

“And what was the second?” 

“Dean.” 

**.x.**

Sam stares at Dean’s back as he washes the dishes, spoon dangling from his hand and a half eaten bowl of god knows what forgotten in front of him. Dean finishes it up in the sink, dishwasher left unused since forever, and moves to one of the stoves, starts to scrub away at the grease collected there with the same concentration he had dedicated to the pans a minute ago. Had he known him any less, Sam wouldn’t have noticed the strain in his movements as Dean hopped around the kitchen, looking for things to do, to wash, to put away in the right cabinet. 

That wasn’t what was enthralling him, though. There was nothing new about Dean’s dedication to the kitchen; Sam had watched it since Dean was tall enough to reach the burners on the stove, from his pleasure on cooking to the way he looked for things to do when everything else around him was just this side of too bad. No, that part of him Sam knows well enough. 

What’s killing him is just about everything else. It’s the feeling that lodges in his throat, as if someone is holding down a thumb right on the hollow of it, obstructing his air as he comes to the realization that he hasn’t seen his brother in a long time. 

Sam had never dared to imagine what their life would be like if they ever stopped hunting --he honestly hadn’t thought they would ever come that far-- but if he had then the picture wouldn’t have been so different from the way they’ve been living so far. He should have seen that coming; the way Dean moves around the bunker like a ghost, the word not used lightly when they know exactly what that was about, the way he does nearly everything he used to do, but with a blank stare in his face as if he was in the automatic mode. Sam can’t really blame him, not when he himself still wakes up in the middle of the night, scared shitless of his own dreams. 

Dean grunts as he stretches to reach the left burner, shifts the weight to his left leg before continuing, and the movement takes Sam out of his own head. 

“What you’ve done today?” Sam asks, cringes to himself a second later at the tone. He’ll probably deserve the snark that’s coming. 

“Well, I knitted you a real nice scarf,” Dean doesn’t miss a beat, not even turning to him to answer. “Sat on my ass, answered the phone,” he continues, bored.

Sam hears it as code for “Went wandering around the bunker again but fuck if I’ll tell you”. He knows Dean’s been doing that for as long as he’s been told not to, especially when Sam goes on his own errands and takes long to come back. 

“I was thinking,” Sam starts, getting up to drop what’s left of the fruit salad he had been eating on the garbage and wash the bowl, “since we’re going to town tomorrow we could spend a day or two there, get out of here for a while.” 

“You’re not eating right,” Dean says as if he hadn’t been listening to him, lips curled into a frown as he eyes the pieces of papaya that had gotten stuck in the bowl fall to the drain. Sam heart clenches at the familiar tone of his voice, the same one he’s been hearing since he was a kid being picky about food. 

“Did you hear anything I said?” 

“Spend time in town, I hear you,” Dean answers, and it’s like the spell is broken and he’s back to being the stranger Sam’s been living with for the past few years. “Sure, whatever.” 

Dean wraps up his work and leaves the kitchen. Sam stares at the sink for a while before noticing the water is still running, closes the tap and leaves too. 

**.x.**

“You probably shouldn’t be putting that much strain on your knee,” Sam phrases it carefully to a Dean that is wasted enough for Sam to force some truths on him. He admits that was part of his plan all along with the idea of spending some time on the city, though not the main one. 

“Fuck you,” is all Dean says, no heat in his voice. 

“You’re a real pleasure to deal with,” Sam replies, taking another swig at his beer. 

“Ain’t I,” Dean says noncommittally, letting his eyes wander around the bar, though it’s not like there’s a lot to see other than frat kids embarrassing themselves. “You went to see that priest again?” 

“I did, yeah,” Sam answers, suppressing the explanation that he went there for the books. A lifetime will pass before he relearns that he doesn’t need to justify himself. His attention is focused on picking the label of an empty bottle as Dean grunts his acknowledgement. 

“You spend a helluva lot’a time there,” he continues. 

“Fuck’s sake, Dean, he’s a priest.” 

“That wouldn’t stop _me_.” 

“Spare me the details, please.” 

“Lemme tell you about this one priest in Montana, he sucked dick like a pro--” 

Sam honest to God snorts at the mental image and if that doesn’t say something about his once religious life he doesn’t know what else would. He kicks Dean’s legs under the table for him to stop, watches as he beams up on one of those rare smiles that reach his eyes, mischievous glint at the corners like when they were younger and lighter and alive. Dean’s stories always had this aura of incredulity around them, that made Sam never be sure if he was telling the truth or just shiting him. He never really wanted to know.

He watches Dean greet the waitress with his bottle as their laughter dies, takes in the silver that’s slowly taking over his temples, spiking the spots where his hair is lighter, the new batch of wrinkles around his eyes as he smiles. Sam still thinks Dean’s the most beautiful person he’s ever met; he wishes he could still tell him that. “I worshipped you,” he says instead. 

“What,” Dean says absently. 

“When we were kids, you were my whole world.” 

He’s not sure why he’s saying that; maybe the beer and the shots took their toll at him after all, but Dean just smiles at him, no smirk added to it, like they’re sharing a secret in the form of a memory.

“Yeah, Sammy,” he says. It reaches his eyes. 

**.x.**

The first time Dean sneaked into Sam’s room during the night he ended up on the ground, flat on his back as Sam recollected himself just enough to realize it was his brother, not someone trying to attack him. If Sam wanted to be honest with himself, he’d remember a lot of times when there wasn’t that much of a difference between the two, but he chooses to push it back and tag it as an overreaction. 

“Don’t do that,” was all Sam said after they finished cursing at each other and he helped Dean up. 

On his defense, Dean honest to God knocked on the door the nights after the incident, until Sam started leaving a rest open. He comes in when the night is cold enough so that the fucked up heater on his room serves for nothing; it had simply stopped working right ages ago and their collective expertise on electrical improvising wasn’t enough to fix it, and they weren’t about to bring someone inside the bunker to do it either. Sam hears the footsteps he’s learned to recognize as Dean’s now, the characteristic sound of his limp overriding the quick and heavy steps he had marked as Dean’s in his memory. He gets in and places himself on his usual spot, the inches apart from Sam’s back just enough to make him shiver in anticipation the whole night for something that rarely ever comes. 

Sam lives for the moments Dean closes the distance, glues their bodies together and breathes him in; how ridiculous it is, he thinks, that he’s just as head over heels for his brother as he had been as a teenager. There is love that has a chance to mature, and then there’s theirs. Dean breathes harder because of the pain, Sam’s learn to recognize that too, and he reaches back to bring Dean’s arm around him, holds his hand on his own. Dean shimmies in place to get his other arm from under him, uses it to play with Sam’s hair. 

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs into Sam’s nape, the hot puffs of air bringing goosebumps to Sam’s arm where he is holding Dean. 

He’s got into the habit of whispering apologies like this, on Sam’s back when they’re about to sleep. Sam guesses that’s as far as he’ll get and accepts them all, fills each and every one of them with a backstory, assigns them to their places. The first time Dean had done it while crying, a storm roaring outside loud enough for them to hear it there on the underground, Sam assigned it to all the times Dean hadn’t let him die. He took the sorry in and let it mend the loose parts still floating around him; it didn’t work, didn’t fix anything, but was still more than he had expected at that point.

“You were my whole world,” Dean repeats his words from weeks ago, voice still muffled by their proximity. Sam’s confused for a moment because he never actually says anything more in moments like this, then lets it sink in how they’ve been talking about it in the past tense. “I wanted you so much I forgot you’re not mine to have, I don’t… I don’t know when it happened. I don’t know when it changed. I just… I forgot you had to live your own fucking life, that you could do that, that you could… I was so scared to see that you could live without me,” he snorts, as if he’s surprised with his own words. Sam wants to tell him that no, he couldn’t, he just had tried really hard. “I was so scared you’d leave me that I.”

He stops there, slams the brakes at his own thoughts, but Sam can still fill in the gaps. He turns around to face Dean, who hurries to get a hand to his eyes, as if they still needed to do this. 

A week before Sam had tried to pray. 

He had sat there and stared at his hands and tried to remember what you were supposed to do. He should know the ropes; but he just stared and stared till his hands didn’t feel like his anymore. Sam had prayed in the Cage; boy, did he prayed. For the first couple centuries, maybe. He prayed till the hands that didn’t really exist there got bloody from trying to get at the thorns of the crown put on his head to mock him. He’s sure God got the irony; he’s also sure He didn’t give a shit.

It had not been _one of those nights_ because Sam was not up to it, so Dean had just sat there. He had made him lay down and put the covers over him, and had tucked his hair back, and had made him cry because it had been so long. Sam had craved the touch as if it had been two thousands years since the last time Dean gently shushed him and wiped his tears with his hands; they were as big and calloused as ever, except they smelled like gasoline and soap, not grave dirt and gunpowder.

“I won’t leave you,” Sam says now, moving Dean’s hand away from his face. “I should have done it God knows how many times, tried a couple, but it’s not because I want to live without you, or even because I can-- ‘cause I don’t really think I do. You know why’s that, don’t you? I’m scared too because I’d never realized I can put myself first and when I did…”

“I’ve always put you first…” 

“No, you _didn’t_. You just thought you did, but it was for you, Dean. You said it yourself, it _changed_. You just needed to control every goddamn aspect of my life so that you wouldn’t be alone,” Sam interrupts him back. “Realizing I could be my own person was the scariest thing I’ve ever done because then I noticed you’d never let me do that.” 

“I held you back, I know--”, Dean tries to start as Sam sits on the bed, too much nervous energy bubbling up on him to keep laying down. 

“You’re not getting it, are you? I’m not talking about living the normal life, Dean. I’m talking about making my own choices. _Owning_ my life. I’d choose you anytime but you were too caught up on your own ass to believe that, weren’t you,” Dean lets his hands fall beside him, stares at the ceiling and sighs, as uncomfortable as ever with confrontation even if he was the one who initiated it. Sam doesn’t have it in him to feel sorry for him now. “God, look at us. We’ve been to Heaven and Hell and we still take twenty years at a time to discuss anything face to face ever.”

He flops down on the bed again, as interested in the ceiling as Dean. He feels like a deflated balloon now that the heat of it had passed; it’s weird to not be keeping those words with him anymore. It doesn’t take long till they gravitate toward each other again, like twins in the womb they never really shared at the same time. Sam can’t see the color of Dean’s eyes in the dark and there’s no windows to cast light on them there, so many feet under the ground, but he knows it as he knows the lines of his hands and maybe that’s the point, after all.        

“The other day I realized I couldn’t trust God again,” he says to the space between their mouths. Dean’s nose brushes his as he tilts his head to meet Sam’s eyes. “But that’s ‘cause he’s never been the one I loved.”

"What’s that about, Sammy,” Dean whispers back. “We ain’t got nothin’ to do with God anymore.”

“No, we don’t.”


End file.
